mikebenfield

I don't know, but I see unnecessary all caps in other words too - it's not infrequent that I see JAVA and sometimes RUST (for the programming languages). Kind of irks me, but obviously doesn't really matter. Ultimately I think it's just a weird niche cultural holdover from the very early days of computing when lots of random stuff was arbitrarily capitalized, like FORTRAN was originally all caps, maybe related to early character sets that only had capital letters.

> building more housing doesn’t reduce the demand for housing

This is so obviously contrary to experience and common sense I'd characterize it as delusional.

> in scripting languages, a statement does not depend on the following ones to be executed, meaning that the code can just be read through

I'm pretty sure this is nonsense and is not a consistent way to distinguish languages that are considered scripting languages and languages considered compiled languages.

> Compile litterally means "group together".

Maybe so, but as a technical term in computer science, it means translate from one language to another.

That said, I definitely agree that compile times matter.

> plus 8 bytes for the tag

The tag can often be stored inline in the data, so doesn't necessarily require extra space.

> because they always take up as much space as the largest wrapped type

Yeah... but what's the alternative?

People have to make judgments about which experts in which fields to trust. Should I believe a Catholic priest (or a Muslim imam, or a Jewish rabbi) when it comes to questions about the nature of the universe? What about when it comes to questions of ethics? They are experts, after all.

What about psychology? I am by no means an expert in psychology, but I'm also well aware that there is a big crisis in that field, where apparently most results can't be replicated, and there seems to be a lot of both outright data manipulation and just sheer incompetence with statistics on the part of researchers. But should I just uncritically accept results in that field? Again, I'm not an expert, so apparently I'm not allowed to be skeptical.

> And Go has succeeded despite these condescending diatribes on how a language needs to have a Hindley-Milner type system with ADTs and type classes to be useful

Fine. But it's beside your parent comment's point. The article claims that everyone thought Go's type system was an advance on the state of the art. This isn't even close to true.

Well you're not going to be much of a Rust user if you don't learn the basics of lifetimes anyway. I don't mean to get all gatekeepy, but if someone's not comfortable with &str and &[T], they're missing half the point of the language and won't be able to use much library code anyway.

It might be a reasonable thing for a candidate to do. But for a company to judge me based on whether or not I've done it is silly.

I haven't been ghosted "so much." I've worked at a cool startup and two FAANGs. But there's no guarantee the interview process will go your way no matter how good you are; there's a lot of luck and interpretation involved.

Yes, while I do not advocate lying, it seems clear to me that this is the effect of these types of interview questions: filtering for better BS artists. I am continually amazed that anyone thinks these questions are doing anything else.

And in particular a lot of people seem to think it's impossible to lie and not get caught out, which... all I can say to that is I don't see how anyone who has lived as a human among other humans could possibly think that.

> if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use our free tier, that also tells us a lot about their (dis)interest in doing for what is, for everyone else on our team, career-defining creations.

This is on a completely different planet from my experience as a candidate and as an interviewer.

It looks like you're doing interesting work, and it might be great to work for you. But that's true of a lot of other companies. You're asking for a level of interest and dedication to your company that is completely unwarranted at this stage. For all I know you're about to ghost me. I suspect a major effect of your approach is that you select people who are better BS artists and have fewer employment options.

IME dating apps are pretty much broken, and yield a deeply frustrating experience for most users. There are some entrenched apps that have the vast bulk of users despite their shortcomings. Unless someone figures out a way to give a better experience, that’s not going to change, open source or not.

Well, OK. But by that logic, if the language they had been most familiar with was Fortran, should they have used Fortran for Facebook? I tend to think that there are actually material differences between languages and technologies, and it's worth knowing more than one language and not using terrible ones.

Unless you’re on some crazy fast ester, that should not happen at all. The injection forms a depot in your muscle that gradually puts testosterone into your bloodstream. Your actual blood testosterone levels should not vary dramatically from day to day with regular injections

> What blows my mind is that Python was designed for maths and data science by a maths and data science guy.

Neither of these is true. I actually still find it a little weird that Python became so widely adopted by data science people, and that definitely doesn’t seem to be the main user GvR originally had in mind when creating the language.

That's not what your parent comment asked for.

What other programming languages are used in Linux kernel code?

FWIW I've found that compilers' code generation around intrinsics is often suboptimal in pretty obvious ways, moving data around needlessly, so I resort to assembly. For me this has just been for hobby side projects, but I'm sure people doing it for stuff that matters run into the same issue.

> Those 30-page C++ compiler errors are definitely worse than whatever I had to do with (for example) Python.

C++ is sort of the canonical example of a language with a terrible type system, so it's not really the right place to look for this comparison.

I definitely didn't understand how to use differentials just by learning calculus, but maybe it is possible.

Yes, it is possible to treat d as a differential operator, and then dy and dx are the differentials of functions, and it makes sense to take their ratio. You can learn about this by reading about differential forms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_form

Unfortunately I don't know a treatment of this subject that explains how to apply this concept to basic calculus without introducing some other more difficult concepts.

Well, note that partly due to the way variables and functions are declared in C and C++, parsing those languages (especially C++) is a complete mess.

I think the readability argument is pretty subjective. Personally I find declarations in for instance Rust a lot easier to quickly scan than C++. For one thing the names of functions are all at the same offset, which to me is actually the most important thing. I can see at a glance whether it's a function or variable being declared. I've never found the fact that the return type is at the end to be a problem - why would it be?

fn first_function(...) -> i32 { ... }

fn second_function(...) -> Vec<i32> { ... }

const X: i32 = 0;

vs

int first_function(...) { ... }

vector<int> second_function(...) { ... }

int X = 0;

I know your claim will strike some people as absurd, but I agree. I am honestly flabbergasted that any general purpose language created in the last 20 years doesn't have sum types and pattern matching. To me they are very nearly as fundamental as aggregate types (aka structs or product types).

If you're a former Googler, then you know that the role description for L6 indicates that an L6 is indeed supposed to exert a lot of leadership and influence, even if not a manager.

I honestly don't understand why this wasn't always obvious. A good investment is one that increases in value (aka cost) dramatically. Dramatic increases in the cost of housing might have negative consequences. What part of this requires deep insight to see?

You're phrasing this as disagreeing with me but I don't see your anecdote as contradicting me at all. A lot of people would strongly prefer to make $400k rather than $150k, and not just college grads. Not everyone, and maybe not you, but many people. Are we actually disagreeing here?

IMO this is 100% right and not just for new grads. The compensation for software engineers is on such a broad spectrum. Even if I think leetcode style questions are completely inane and reveal horrendous values, I'll put up with it for the prospect of double the compensation (or more).

> And C++ just... doesn't have that many real problems.

I can honestly say I've never known anyone who has written a lot of code in both C++ and some other language who has this opinion. I'd say, to the contrary, that almost every feature and characteristic of C++ is a problem - it's either a complete disaster in terms of programmer ergonomics or it makes it way too easy to create terrible bugs. It's _all_ wrong.

> That’s because people want to live in low rise buildings.

> The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own.

Then why is it necessary for LA and other localities to make it literally illegal to build denser housing? After all, if detached single family homes are what people want, then surely simple supply and demand will lead to that being what's predominantly built, right?

(Spoiler: Single family homes aren't what everyone wants. Plenty of people want other types of housing. People pushing these zoning rules aren't doing it because _they_ want single family homes - they're doing it because they want control over what type of home is available to others.)

It's not a free market due to restrictive zoning. If artificial rules limit the supply of housing in places where people actually want to live, how could the market correct?